cat(etc)blogging: June 2005 Archives

This is Cassiopeia, generally known as Cassie. She’s rather put upon, and has been for ages. She’s 15 years old, she’s been with me since she was 5 months, and in that time, she’s endured a change of residence; the death of her sister, Andie; the arrival of Mrs. Kennedy, which roused her from a grief-stricken funk into a fit of pique; another change of residence; and the arrival of Sammy, which so thoroughly discombobulated her that she’s only just lately recovered to something like her old self.

A friend of mine likens Cassie to Margaret Dumont in the old Marx Brothers movies, a regal lady trying desperately to retain her dignity in the face of insanity all around her. Poor thing.

Playstations and television are replacing pets in the modern home as families discover the hectic pace of their lives leaves no room for animals, according to new research.

Oh, no!

In some cases, children are even turning to virtual pets instead of the real thing.

That may be the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.

Rudimentary virtual pets such as Tamagotchi continue to sell, and in October Nintendo will release a virtual pet game, Nintendogs, in which virtual dogs will respond to voice commands and bark at Nintendogs on other nearby consoles.

No, I take it back: this is the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.

[from The Scotsman]

How could anyone not have room in his heart -- and in his home among the DVD players and flatscreen plasma TVs and the Swiss Army Knife USB drives -- for Sam:

Sammy has a better story than many people I know. See, a few years back, a friend of mine overheard, on the bus, an elderly German lady who lived in our neighborhood telling someone about "Sammy" and how she was "a slave to him" (it’s somehow even funnier with her Old World accent). My friend figured she was talking about her husband. She was talking about her cat. And this is that cat.

What happened was that last year, this nice old lady -- whose name, coincidentally, was also Maryann -- was in the hospital for a long time and then ended up having to go to a nursing home or somesuch and couldn’t take the cat with her. The neighbor who’d been looking after Sam was having a hell of a time finding a new home for him, and they were talking about putting him to sleep. There was no way on Earth I was going to let anyone put an animal down merely because a home couldn’t be found for him, so here he is.

Sammy’s been with me for a little over a year now, and my other cats have finally resigned themselves to his presence: Cassie (whom you’ll meet next Friday) has learned to ignore him, though Mrs. Kennedy, in her infinite stupidity, continues to be fascinated by him, keeps trying to make friends with him. Sam, who lived alone with one old lady and no other cats for all of his 14 years before he came here, appears to have no clue what these other furry things are.

I adore Sammy, by the way, but I am not a slave to him. He’s learning to live with that.

I’m fascinated by this catblogging thing that all the bloggers are into, even the political bloggers and others who usually write about utterly un-cat-related and un-adorableness-related things. Carnival of the Cats, a metablog about catblogging, explains its own existence as a "non-political respite from the vehement echo chamber that the Blogopshere tends to spin itself into during the week. It also demonstrates that even the mightiest or meekest of pundits still have a love of cats in common." All of which is also a pretty damn good explanation for the phenomenon of catblogging.

But why do bloggers -- and by bloggers I mean geek bloggers, because I think it’s safe to suggest that blogging about anything is nothing if not geeky (in that good way I’m trying to promote) -- why do bloggers love cats so darn much? Of course there’s the whole tiger-on-your-couch, Wild Kingdom-in-your-kitchen thing that appeals to cat people of all ages, but I wonder if a love of science fiction and fantasy, which is a dominant meme among geeks and perhaps a defining characteristic of geekiness, is a contributing factor? (Cat ownership is rampant among serious SF/F fans.) SF/F trains you to recognize that the way things are isn’t the way things necessarily have to be, enables you to see the cultural programming we’re all subject to, helps you see the strings that pull us all in a way that not everyone does... and it does that by introducing you to alien societies -- whether they’re in the future, on another planet, or in a magical realm.

And cats are certainly alien in a way that dogs aren’t. Not to put down dogs -- some of my favorite people are dogs -- but they just aren’t as complicated or mysterious as cats. Individual cats each have their own agendas beyond all that obvious napping and eating, and the continual discovering and rediscovering of that is part of the intrigue of living with cats.

All of which is merely to justify my own indulgence in flogging kitties on the Web, metaphorically speaking, of course:

This is Mrs. Kennedy. She’s not named for Jackie O. or anything silly like that -- she’s named, because I am a geek, after a character in a movie, a series of movies, actually: Napoleonic sailor Archie Kennedy (as played by Jamie Bamber, now all over Battlestar Galactica) in the British Horatio Hornblower films. And she’s named after Archie because, like him, she was a meek little creature until she got thrown in the slammer (in her case, the carrier in which I transported her home from the shelter), at which point she turned into an escape-crazed maniac.

She’s cute, huh? And good thing, too, because it’s pretty much the only thing to recommend her. She’s the world’s dumbest cat -- I’ve witnessed her sniff at a burning candle, get her whiskers singed, and go back and do the same thing again 10 seconds later -- and she’s a mean little minx 90 percent of the time, too. Her looks are her saving grace... and the fact that the other 10 percent of the time she isn’t being a little monster, she’s bursting with the kind of personality that goes along with being rock stupid and constantly rediscovering your own tail.